We Regret to Inform You Ted Cruz Will Be in the Senate for Another Six Years
Ted Cruz has won another six years in the Senate.
The conservative incumbent, who was seeking reelection for this third term in Congress, held off Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, whose insurgent campaign shook the nerves of Senate Republicans who couldn’t afford to lose a seat in deep-red Texas.
The contest between Cruz and Allred, a former NFL linebacker, became a late target for Democrats, as polls began to show a tight race that offered the party a slim chance to retain their narrow control of the Senate, amid a difficult 2024 election map.
Cruz has long been despised by liberals, and is also unpopular among Republican leaders. Democrats poured money into the Texas Senate race in 2018 and failed to unseat Cruz, though he only won by 2.6 percent against Beto O’Rourke. Texas gained close to 3 million new voters since Cruz last ran for office in 2018, leading to a level of uncertainty about his bid for a third term.
In 2016, Cruz was booed at the Republican National Convention for declining to endorse Donald Trump. Trump had insulted Cruz’s wife’s appearance and said that Cruz’s father helped in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Cruz has since fallen in line and become an advocate for Trump. The former president endorsed Cruz at an October rally in Austin, offering him his “complete and total endorsement.”
As the race tightened, Cruz received major support from Republican Super PACs, billionaires, and dark money donors.
According to The Wall Street Journal, billionaire Elon Musk contributed $2 million to help Cruz — the money went to a dark money group that then transferred funds to a pro-Cruz Super PAC. Musk’s company Tesla is based in Texas, and he also announced in July that he is moving SpaceX headquarters to Texas as well.
The dark money network led by Leonard Leo, who’s known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative super majority, donated $2.5 million to a pro-Cruz Super PAC.
Abortion was a key issue in the race. Texas has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and even effectively bans emergency abortion care.
Cruz supported an effort at the Supreme Court to allow states to ban emergency abortions in hospitals across the country, as Rolling Stone previously reported. He was one of 26 senators who signed a brief supporting an attempt to overrule the Biden administration’s requirement that emergency rooms be permitted to provide abortions to protect a mother’s health.
ProPublica recently reported the stories of two women in Texas who died as a result of hospitals refusing to provide them medically necessary abortion care. One of the stories focused on the death of Nevaeh Crain, 18, who visited three different emergency rooms in Texas before she was admitted. At the second, she was diagnosed with sepsis, a dangerous infection, but doctors said her fetus had a heartbeat so she was permitted to leave. At the third, a doctor called for two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise” before she could be moved to intensive care. Crain’s organs began failing. Within hours, she was dead.
The stories are not isolated incidents; the maternal mortality in Texas has spiked since the state first banned abortion.
During a debate between Cruz and Allred in October, Cruz refused to respond to moderators asking whether he supported exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. “I’m curious, why do you keep asking me that?” he said.
He then turned the attention to Allred’s pro-choice record (Allred has promised to “restore a woman’s right to choose”). “He has voted in favor of striking down Texas’ law that gives parents the right to be notified and consent,” Cruz said. “He’s voted in favor of striking down Texas’ law and legalizing abortion up to and including the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy. That’s extreme, and it’s not where the people of Texas are.”
“It’s indefensible that we have Texas women being turned away from hospitals, bleeding out in their cars and waiting rooms, being found by their husbands,” Allred said at another point during the debate. “All of a sudden, the protector of women and girls is going to be Senator Cruz, who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable that if a girl is raped by a relative of hers, a victim of incest, that she should be forced to carry that child to term and give birth to it. You think that’s perfectly reasonable, but now you’re going to set yourself up as a protector of women and girls. It’s laughable.”
The race also focused on the border and immigration. Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, aligns with Trump’s anti-immigrant stance. “I’ve spent a lot of time at our southern border,” Cruz said at a campaign stop in late October. “If you have not been there recently, I promise you, as bad as you think it is, it’s worse.” Throughout his campaign, he has cherry-picked crimes committed by migrants.
Allred, whose grandfather was a customs agent, said in a debate that he supports “physical barriers” to divide the border.
Cruz also faced scrutiny during the Senate race for fleeing south of the border to Cancún, Mexico, in 2021 during a winter storm that devastated Texas. Allred wrote in a social media post: “If you summon a mob to attack our democracy, you have to lose your job. If you go to Cancún when your fellow Texans are freezing in the dark, you have to lose your job.”
The Texas Democratic Party sent mailers reminding voters of the incident. The postcard reads: “I know it’s freezing, and you wish you were here. It’s much warmer in Cancún. Enjoy the freeze. Ted.” At the bottom is an asterisk saying “this is not really from Ted Cruz.”
“Yes it is true that that day I was acting as a dad in addition to being a senator,” Cruz said recently. “I took my children somewhere where they could be warm. I spent one day there and turned around and came back to Texas.”
Allred’s messages wasn’t enough to convince Texas voters to boot Cruz from the Senate.
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